Hot CPUs, Cool Printers

Part One: College Bit

Argh, typing without my wrist rest (it snapped off :-\) is really uncomfortable.

2 minutes later...

How embarrasing. My expensive shiny G19 keyboard's wrist rest is now stuck to it with blu-tack. Still, that's what you get if all the little clips snap off I suppose.

Well, things are once again proceeding apace at college, as the dreaded Semester 2 final exam is tiptoeing its way towards us at the rate of approximately 7 days each week, which has got more than a couple of people hot under the collar. In preparation, I've been busy cracking on with as many of the online curriculum modules as I could cope with.

10,400 words and an online exam (100%) later, I'm now thoroughly sick of reading about EIGRP, and looking forward to a couple of nice easy modules. The next one is an introduction to Link-State protocols, and then we apply what we learn there, to the one after, which teaches us about OSPF.

Of course, we've already summarised both chapters at college, so it's more a case of cementing our understanding, than it is a case of being introduced to new stuff. If we all pass, I imagine that we're going to be getting on with another end of semester exam. Hopefully Jim can avoid drunkenly getting into a fight with vegetation this time, as apparently when the bush beat him last time, he was injured.

We're already planning our college christmas party, and even ickle Jack (who has since left the course) has said he will come. We might even be able to get our tutor to turn up for a couple of drinks. So yeah.

Part Two: Christmas Bit

So it looks like I've got a busy Christmas calendar. Yep, lots of people still think it's too early for that sort of thing, however, friends tell me they've already arranged their work Christmas parties, pubs and restaurants are taking bookings for Christmas dinners, and advent calendars are already on sale in the shops (surely, the chocolate inside them must expire before you even open it?). I might get myself an advent calendar with chocolates this year, as I miss having one to open every morning heh. The lil dude tells me he has a Lego calendar (Star Wars lego maybe?) this year, which should be fun for him. Until either his or our dog eats the bits, which seems to have become the new natural end of the life cycle of the Lego piece, in our respective houses.

But yeah. So far, this year, my preliminary christmas calendar includes (in some semblance of an approximate order, and subject to weather):

*Trip to Winter Wonderland in London
*Trip to Gainsborough old Hall
*Trip to Kelham Island Christmas Fair Thingy (which we missed last year cos of the snow)
*Trip to Wentworth to look round their Christmas department
*Trip to Castleton to wander round (they have illuminated christmas trees lining the streets in winter)
*Trip to Christmas Concert type thing again.
*Solo trip to local christmassy supermarket to buy some Christmas necessities (shortbread, beer, mexicana cheese, etc. I'll probably need to get some medication of some type as well, as I generally have a cold around Xmas time)
*College Xmas Party
*Work Xmas Party (generally just a few drinks at a pub near work, or even closing early and drinking in the shop)
*Family shopping trip for Xmas food
*Xmas Day
*Boxing Day

There may be others in there as well, such as taking the ickle dude round the "Magical Christmas Kingdom".

But yeah, lots of stuff to be getting on with, but first, lots of studying and whatnot.

I still need to start buying presents.

Part Three: Technological Bit

Well, I've been settling into the routine with my shiny new computer, and apart from one or two blips, it's been working fine.
One blip occured the other night. See, because of a chipset incompatibility (I think), my cooler will only draw power from the motherboard 3 boots out of every 5. The other 2 times it will refuse to power on.

"Send the cooler back" you might say. Doesn't work, if one cooler will do it, the replacement will do it. It's an incompatibility, not a hardware failure.

Anyway, last weekend, I came back proceeded to put Need for Speed on, and spent a happy hour racing around, earning money, and generally beating all comers. At some point, I wondered what the cpu temp would be after an hour of gaming.
Finding the LCD Display to be dark, I realised that I'd effectively been racing an hour on passive cooling only!
Restarting the machine, I checked to make sure the cooler had come on, and it did straight away, shrieking overtemp warnings at me, and flashing a coolant temperature of 89C! Coolant temperature is generally lower than CPU core temp, so I have no IDEA what the cpu temp was at that time. (It turns out that the max working temp for my processor is 75C, and the CPU's emergency shutdown temp is 125C. In retrospect, I hadn't damaged the CPU, and hadn't really run the risk of damaging it, but it was still a scary moment).

I set the cooler to Extreme cooling mode, which pushed the fan and pump up to max rpms, and the coolant temp took maybe a minute or so to drop from 89c to 29c. That's a good cooler! Phew, what a scare.
I'll get a cable so I can connect the cooler directly to the PSU in future. Should stop this happening again.

Part Three And A Bit: New Technological Friend

As I am wont to do, on my lunch break, I wandered into the lab at college to see what was what. While there, I examined the scrap shelf to see if there was anything interesting. Was there? Of course not. A few defunct laptops stacked like house bricks, a huge box of loose parts which some 16 year old created from what was once a working computer, and a huge slab sided thing which looked like a broken fax machine, that had been there since february, and hadn't been thrown in a skip yet.
Out of idle curiosity (it had been there since I first started college, I wondered what it was), I cleared the stacked crap off it and pulled it off the shelf onto the workbench. It turned out to be one of those all in one scanner printer thingumies that seem popular these days.

"What is this? What's wrong with it? It's been on the shelf at least since february"
The tutor wandered over. "Nothing's wrong with it".
"Well, why is it on a shelf, it's just taking up space".
"Take it if you want it", he replies.

Umm. Wow. After establishing if he was being serious, I scooted around until I found the power brick for it. I plugged the device in and turned it on, at which point it immediately started doing a sort of POST, checking all its functions, and making various clicking and clunking noises. Hmm, not broken then.
Later in my lunch break, I continued to play with it, and had a closer look at it. It was a scanner, printer, fax and copier, all in one. Awesome, since my scanner doesn't want to work with Windows 7 any more.

I managed to get a lift to take the thing home, and spent the rest of the night playing with it. 4 ink cartridges, 3 of which were almost full, the scanner worked flawlessly, and the print quality was fantastic. Wow.

So yeah, for anyone who's remotely bothered, it's an HP L7580 all-in-one type thing, designed mainly for small businesses rather than homes, which explains why it is freaking huge (it weights 32 pounds and dwarfs my lil laser printer). It copies, faxes, scans up to 4800DPI and can spit out awesome quality colour prints to the tune of about 5 a minute (best quality photos) or 34 pages (decent quality text) a minute.
Since printing monochrome on a laser printer is a hell of a lot cheaper than printing in colour on an inkjet, I'm tempted to use the Laser printer for high volume stuff like college coursework, and use the inkjet for more colourful and intricate stuff, as well as photos. Also, it has an internal speaker so it makes happy little beep boop noises as you use it, heh. Oh, and it prints directly from memory card :-D.





Having a scanner that works is awesome, and at 1200dpi (which isn't even beginning to push the scanner's capabilities), this one can turn a DVD cover into a picture which if you printed it out at its new resolution would measure 4 and a half meters by three meters! So yeah. Very very happy.

I wonder at this point if I should come up with cute little names for my printers. Write your suggestions on a postcard, and then scan the postcard and email it to me at an undisclosed address :-).

Anyway, really running out of time now, got to get ready for work, so I'd best get busy :-).

Here is a shiny picture of my new printer dwarfing my cute ickle laser printer :-).